Youngmi is an exhibiting artist, researcher, and teacher whose work weaves together material culture, artistic practice, scholarship, and spirituality. She holds an AM in Regional Studies in East Asia from Harvard University, an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union. Her academic work examines how women construct selves-in-progress through narrative practice, a framework that shapes her approach to material culture.

As a hospice chaplain, she integrated arts into spiritual care and witnessed how making serves as a pathway to meaning-making during life’s most vulnerable moments. Her chapter, “Use of the Arts and Self in Spiritual Care,” appears in Spiritual Care & Clinical Practice Transformed: At the Intersection of Vulnerability & Awe (2026).

Her current research explores Zhen Xian Bao (针线包), portable sewing containers made of fabric and paper that fold flat yet expand into multiple compartments, holding threads and needles alongside personal memorabilia. Documented among ethnic minority communities in China and known in Korea as saeksilcheop (색실첩), these objects trace a broader East Asian material culture of women’s portable craft tools—material metaphors for the dynamic selves women create through daily practices of making.